A Dead Husband

        Non-fiction begins with durative nonsense occupied with, I don�t know, the weather? Fresh dates chiseled out of a mourning calendar to mark, for the reader�s convenience, an exact day to imagine. Perhaps, looking up, one can observe the sun hanging rather low to the east, pale behind the morning, thirty-seven degrees outside with clouds blanketing the bottom of the azure up there like a bath towel, drying it off, in Northern Philadelphia, 1993, January 18th. Now that I�ve had my gimmick, farewell conventions (blowing across the palm of my hand, imagining specks of glitter out the window), now I shall proceed.
        Clarence is Dead, altogether cold in his box buried under a heap of black mud. I took his surname, both of us Dead�s�but his headstone already sits irenic, both dates hammered into a laminated Gabbro chunk. His face bloated cocaine white, laying limp and sliding with the G�s from the long rattling stretcher, where he was declared Dead, electrocuted from a smoking toaster. Clarence was snagged between insurance policies and the Dead bill, fresh and heavy in my purse, sagging with ripeness.
        The Dead house is decaying, a miniscule den with beige aluminum peeling layer by layer. At the tops of the rooms the sweeping fans rotate slowly to the point of merely stirring rather than blowing, oblivious to any higher setting (Clarence, wouldn�t-you-know, was supposed to fix that). Everything is Dead, I have observed.
        I can remember a week ago, having coffee and stirring through all the morning actions, Clarence finally noticing the fan. Hovering over the counter, Clarence awake an hour or so before I stirred, �How do you want your coffee� he asked as I stumbled and moaned into the kitchen in my dark blue robe.
        �Black. Did the paper come?�
        �No, not yet, I just looked,� Clarence said, pouring the water into the coffee pot. �Did you talk to the doctor?�
        I tumbled onto a chair (without dignity, but exhaustion instead), trying to occupy myself to remembering what it was that I dreamt. There was a glistening black raven at the window, peering in at the stove. Clarence carried a petite grey plate with a tofu scramble neatly wrapped on it, an olive hanging out of the one end, flicking the fan switch as he juggled the plate onto the table. He instantly noticed the slow page of the wings on the fan, and stood by the dial hopelessly fiddling with it. �Did you make it to the doctor?� he asked again, intently staring at the fan as he twisted the knob.
        �Yes,� I murmured. �I have an appointment�
        I married C. U. Dead, bottled up in shimmering white dress with expensive tooled lace done in silk, at a Lutheran church in Philadelphia to appease his barking gene donors. Clarence stood at the altar twisting the plain platinum band I handed him as I proposed, staring down the isle while his fianc� was led up to matrimony, to eternity, and all that liminal nonsense. We, Mr. Clarence U. Dead and Mrs. Clara I. Dead, had our ardent audience, long white limousine, stain glass windows refracting all the light into wild psychedelic patterns in the floor�I followed all the raging conventions with style. Old man Dead and his jabbering wife beamed at the match, at the ceremony, at the drab absurdity of it all. I tempted vanity that once only.
        I had just graduated when we got our bands and I became Dead, Mrs. C. I. Dead, with my degrees in Environmental Science and Philosophy from Cornell both hanging in dark reddish wood frames on my side of the room. Clarence slept with his head buried in a pillow, facing the other way on his bare side, always violently lurching in the dark. When we were in bed, panting over each other, he gradually got more aggressive, pounding it in me, fighting and trying to tower over in some element of superiority. He scrapped and clawed, he tore my lace, bruised my bottom, but was helpless to his occupation, his life, his aspirations. C. U. Dead and I met through a paper he had published in a University Journal, a brilliant essay reconsidering metaphysical idealism through quantum-mechanics. His fresh interpretation of universals was compelling, astounding, attractive, two days later I considered the reality of the experience of pleasure through furious copulation�then considering yonder on together, supine and nude. That year he dropped out of Swarthmore, a junior.
        It is the past that towers over tomorrow, a fastidious temptress placating the mind to what it will: dread of the Dead harboring the have done over the will have. A snare for the amateur chrononaut, and what is the solution, the explication to the horror of past? Answer: Buddhist indifference. And somehow traipsing through the front door from the hospital, that sour ache crawling around in my belly like a raging malignant worm, it was the past that seduced my gloom. �I made you coffee,� Clarence said, setting a massive round mug filled to the brim with steaming bean water on a coaster. �How did it go?�
        �Fine.�
        �Well, that was a relief,� he sighed, staring into some fantasy trance to create a sense of empathy for his suffering wife. �A real relief, it�s better this way. Perhaps we will go back to New York next week.�
        �Yes,� I stuttered, �perhaps New York.� Clarence sat down and I drank my coffee without a word. He rambled on some drab blabbery about a paper he would like to try to write, constantly scurrying back to the oven to check on a bagel he had cooking in the oven, and all the while I intuitively sensed some kind of empathy he was trying rig to my emotional turmoil. An understanding of what it is, taking a dead baby out, throwing it away like moldy bread, what that is like, and I resented his speculation. That afternoon a toaster jolted him Dead.
        Love, I admit and preach, is my only private joke. It is transparent and crinkles, the hormones express its texture, and once it has been wrung out like a wet rag it resolves to exist through irrational stubbornness. I tormented those teary-eyed nymphettes, staging their own artless drama, with existentialism�confronting their weak mind addiction. Clarence accepted that plummeting idea, love, admitting to and embracing it, smothering me in the stuff. It gave him ardor. �Clara, what do you think would happen if we hadn�t met,� Clarence had shyly asked, draping an arm around my neck. �Then,� I would answer with indifference, �I would be doing someone else�s laundry.�
        But now, wallowing in the supreme indifference of the universe, destroying the meaning of this, that, us, them, everything is a nihilistic prick. I have achieved this self-actualization surmounting consciousness to a grand observer to nothing, and I have conquered man in the realization. It has gone beyond gender, the death of the unborn, the Dead husband, but now quaking in my sheets, now I�ll go find another, another set of body parts to fill the place, take his seat at dinner, get the groceries.